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Last week on the anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster we published a piece by James Conca (see: Fukushima's Refugees Are Victims of Fear, Not Radiation) where he explained his conviction that the potential threat to Fukushima refugees posed by radiation exposure has been overblown to the point where the irrational fear of radiation is more dangerous to Japan than the radiation itself. The piece generated a host of comments, some supportive, many not. Much of the discussion focused on the merits of Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis (LNT), which suggests there is no safe dose of radiation. Conca -- who has spent decades researching radiological contamination at national labs -- disagrees with LNT, and has prepared the following response to critics of the piece.

By James Conca

Seriously? LNT is not established science, it’s established policy. Ideology and policy are not science. I love Google and Wikipedia, but they don’t take the place of actual research. You need to go back and read the primary documents, review the actual data, read Hermann Mueller’s letters from 1946 and why he chose to ignore certain studies, understand the math of risk analysis, understand the Cold War environment under which LNT was adopted. The job of science is to understand. The job of ideology is to coerce. The people of Japan are not being hysterical, they’re being afraid because we told them to be. Without caring about the consequences. We know better, but sound bites don’t capture the subtleties of this problem.

Risk is relative and only relative. Anyone reading this has a risk of developing cancer by age 70 of about 1 in 5. A risk of developing heart disease of about 1 in 3. A risk of dying in an auto accident of about 1 in 300. A risk of developing cancer from a radiation dose of 100 rem (1 Sv) of about 1 in 100. A risk of developing cancer from a radiation dose of 10 rem (0.1 Sv) of about 1 in 1,000,000. A risk of getting food poisoning during forced evacuation of about 1 in 1,000. A risk of dying from lost medical care during forced evacuation of about 1 in 600. The risk of dying from depression, suicide or alcoholism in the 20 years following a forced evacuation from a serious disaster of about 1 in 100.

If you have an overall risk of 1 in 100 of dying from several causes, then adding a risk of one in a million does not change that risk at all. You would be insane to focus on that 1 in a 1,000,000 risk, but that’s what we are doing in this case. That is all this discussion is about. Not about the real risks that exist from doses above 10 rem/yr (11.5 microSv/hr) that we need to address and to clean-up in those areas around Fukushima, but about the vanishingly-small risks from less than 10 rem/yr (11.5 microSv/hr). LNT forced the U.S. to spend about $200 billion since 1970 to save 100 virtual lives as modeled by LNT. We don’t generally spend $2 billion dollars to save a life, but we do when it comes to radiation, and Japan can’t afford this. It will hurt many more people to waste this money and this effort protecting against nothing when so many real dangers to the people of Japan exist from the tsunami devastation itself and the actual hot zones around Fukushima.

This is not an academic exercise. Just ask the thousands of evacuees recently told by the Belarus government that, oops, we made a mistake, there wasn’t really any risk and you can go back to your homes. No matter that a generation of their lives were destroyed, that about 10,000 died from suicide, depression and alcoholism because the fear was far more devastating than the event itself, using even the most pessimistic pro-LNT estimates. During the first year after the Chernobyl accident, the average dose to inhabitants in Northern Europe was 4.5 mrem (0.045 mSv), i.e., less than 2% of the average global annual natural dose 240 mrem/yr (2.4 mSv/year). This was not worth destroying these people’s lives. And it is exactly the same as eating a bag of potato chips a day.

So it’s all about LNT, the Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis, a supposition that all radiation is deadly and there is no dose below which harmful effects will not occur. Double the dose, double the cancers. Of course, this isn’t true. The millions of nuclear workers that have been monitored closely for 50 years have no higher cancer mortality than the general population but have had several to ten times the average dose. People living in Colorado and Wyoming have twice the annual dose as those in Los Angeles, but have lower cancer rates. These cannot occur if LNT were true, because LNT insists this could not occur. There are no observable effects in any population group around the planet that LNT is true below 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr) even in areas of the Middle East, Brazil and France where natural doses exceed 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr).

LNT was first accepted in 1958 and 1959 by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) as a philosophical basis for radiological protection, stating outright that “Linearity has been assumed primarily for purposes of simplicity, and there may or may not be a threshold dose”. The Soviet, Czechoslovakian and Egyptian delegations to UNSCEAR strongly advocated the LNT assumption in the 1950’s and 60’s and used it as a basis for recommendation of an immediate cessation of nuclear test explosions. It was a Cold War issue.

No matter what you feel about the corporate arrogance and lack of Government oversight that led Tepco to ignore warnings from the U.S. and the IAEA for 20 years, they did properly evacuate to 50 km immediately, told everyone not to eat anything from that region for 3 months while iodine-131 decayed away, and mapped out the dose contours of >10 rem/yr (>0.1 Sv/yr), 5-10 rem/yr (0.05-0.1 Sv/yr), 1-5 rem/yr (0.01-0.05 Sv/yr), and <1 rem/yr (<0.01 Sv/yr). Now they need to clean-up the >10 rem/yr (>0.1 Sv/yr) area as quickly as possible (we can do this, it’s going to cost on the order of $50 billion), provide each evacuee with a small alarming dosimeter pin that can be set at 2 or 5 mrem/hr, runs on a watch battery and comes with an easy-to-understand app (this will cost less than $20 million), repatriate anyone that wants to return, show that any foods grown outside the >10 rem/yr (>0.1 Sv/yr) area is safe (there’s only a few foods that bioconcentrate Cs or Sr, don’t grow those), while rebuilding the infrastructure that was destroyed by the tsunami and quake. And listen to the international community when we tell you you’re not prepared for something like this.